Month: December 2022

Ron Filipkowski is one of the most prolific tweeters of right wing freak show out there and it’s endlessly entertaining (if also kind of terrifying.) He compiled what he considers to be his top 100 right wing tweets and they are something else. I’ve put the top 25 here for your enjoyment:

#25. At a Trump rally, kid is asked what he most looking forward to at the event. Kid goes off the rails on his MAGA parents with his answer: “To see Joe Biden.”

#24. Returning home to Huntington Beach, OAN host loses her mind when she sees that they are flying a Pride flag from a city building.

#23. The opening “prayer” at Eric Trump & Michael Flynn’s event, they ask for Jesus to let Trump know when the time for divine intervention has come for him to resume the presidency, and for God not to “surround him with Deep State, RINO trash.” Amen.

#22. MAGA congressional candidate Martin Hyde, endorsed by Michael Flynn & Roger Stone, throws down his white privilege card and goes full “do you know who I am,” then threatens to get her fired because she dared to give him a speeding ticket.

#21. Marge Greene defines what a woman is. She says they are the “weaker sex” created by God from Adam’s rib, and “we are our husband’s wife.” (Her husband filed for divorce shortly after).

#20. At a protest outside Mar-a-Lago the night after the search warrant, a concerned citizen wants to know why the FBI isn’t arresting Hillary and Hunter.

#19. Shortly before the midterms, Matt Gaetz makes his contribution to record turnout for Gen Z women voting for Democrats, calling women who show up to pro-choice rallies “ugly and overweight.”

#18. Fox guest complains that his trip to Monticello was ruined because the guide talked about Thomas Jefferson owning slaves.

#17. Alex Jones skipped court for the verdict in the Sandy Hook trial. But he live streamed it on air as the nearly billion dollar verdict was handed down, assuring his audience that if they continued to send him money it would still go to him since he filed for bankruptcy.

#16. During his debate, Ron Desantis said elementary schools are teaching kids that white people are oppressors and that it is wrong and incorrect to say that America was built and founded on “stolen land.”

#15. John Bolton says we are safer under Biden than we were under Trump, and he and Newsmax host get in an epic battle where they go into Putin and the Afghanistan withdrawal.

#14. With ‘60 Minutes Australia,’ Kari Lake tells interviewer that people have no freedom in Australia and are locked up in concentration camps because people don’t have guns. She also says J6 people are all being locked up without charges. She then storms out.

#13. Josh Hawley said he is proud of his actions on J6, and he isn’t going to cower, apologize, bend the knee or run from the media over it.

#12. Tucker Carlson does a special on “bromeopathic” therapies to increase testosterone levels, included infrared testicle tanning.

#11. After the Uvalde mass shooting massacre, Junior said assault weapons aren’t the issue because the killer could’ve done the same thing with a bat or machete.

#10. When Desantis came out to do a rally for her, Kari Lake said he has ‘Big Dick Energy,’ just like Trump.

#9. Bill O’Reilly’s flight is delayed, so he starts threatening the Jet Blue employee.

#8. JD Vance said he “doesn’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.”

#7. After news breaks that his Chief of Staff tried to hand a slate of fake WI electors to Mike Pence, Ron Johnson pretends to be on his phone leaving Congress but gets busted by reporter.

#6. Desantis gives his version of how history should be taught. He says that no one had ever questioned before whether slavery was wrong until our Founding Fathers did.

#5. Mike Lindell breaks the news that the FBI just detained him at a Hardees and took his phone.

#4. Rudy did a radio interview where he claimed he had been brutally attacked by a liberal at a Shop Rite. Then the store released security cam footage, which didn’t exactly match Rudy’s story. So we put the audio of the radio interview over the video to compare.

#3. Before heading to be the keynote speaker at the NRA convention, Ted Cruz stops in Uvalde the day after the massacre to blame it on the school doors.

#2. Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Trump was asked on a podcast how he saw the war playing out. Trump put his geopolitical genius on full display by launching into a riff about windmills.

#1. Seeking to make the point about inflation, Mehmet Oz films a video that backfired spectacularly, making him the butt of jokes for weeks at a critical time in the campaign, as he pretends to shop for crudités for his wife.

Originally tweeted by Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) on December 29, 2022.

You can see the rest of them on twitter and there are a few I would have put in the top 25. They are all completely nuts.

#26-50
#51-75
#76-100

In case you are staying home tonight and wondering what you might watch on TV, forget Andy and Anderson and don’t bother with Ryan Seacrest. Have I got the show for you!

I really need to know who plans on tuning into Newsmax's New Year's Eve special on Saturday night.

The guest list includes Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Kevin Sorbo, Michael Savage and John Schneider. They also hint that anchor Shaun Kraisman may actually sing! pic.twitter.com/vTKBq3SFDF

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) December 29, 2022

What a fun bunch! But you might want to lay in a bigger than usual supply of champagne and Advil and maybe think about having some shots to start you off. You’re going to need them.

Here’s a taste of what you might expect from the Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee:

Happy New Year?

A real activist on what it’s like to deal with Dr. Anthony Fauci

There are many, many things that offend me about the cretinous conspiracy theories and braindead rightwing assault on reason and decency. It’s actually a bit overwhelming. But the attack on Dr. Fauci ranks at the top of my list.

I don’t worship the guy by any means and totally understand that he’s made some wrong calls during his long career. But he’s a scientist and therefore changes his mind as new information is discovered. That’s just how it works and those of us who have even a rudimentary, elementary understanding of the scientific method know that.

Peter Staley writes in the NY Times:

The first time I met Dr. Anthony Fauci was at the International AIDS Conference in Montreal during the summer of 1989. ACT UP, the AIDS activist group I was a part of, had scared the bejesus out of conference organizers by seizing the stage during the opening session, then made things worse by disrupting various scientific presentations. Many, if not most, AIDS researchers wanted us hauled away and never heard from again. Little did they know that Dr. Fauci, who was leading the response at the National Institutes of Health, had been meeting with members of ACT UP since shortly after our founding two years earlier.

The regular meetings he had with an ACT UP member, Bill Bahlman, continued even after Larry Kramer, one of the group’s founders, wrote an open letter to Dr. Fauci in The Village Voice calling him a murderer and comparing him to the Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann. But there Dr. Fauci was, meeting with me and my comrades, branded radical homosexuals, to discuss our policy proposal for upending longstanding Food and Drug Administration strictures against public access to drugs before they are approved.

Mr. Kramer had labeled him our enemy, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that as the head of our government’s AIDS research efforts, Dr. Fauci had my life in his hands. Only four years earlier, at the age of 24, I was diagnosed with AIDS-related complex, considered a certain death sentence at the time.

Days after the conference, I found myself in Dr. Fauci’s office, along with the ACT UP members Mark Harrington and Jim Eigo, hammering out the final details of our parallel track program, which would allow thousands of people to obtain experimental drugs outside of traditional clinical trials. Within days, a New York Times front page headline about Dr. Fauci read, “AIDS Researcher Seeks Wide Access to Drugs in Tests.” The F.D.A. quickly fell in line. ACT UP had scored its first major victory, with Dr. Fauci’s help.

But then we turned our focus to the myriad problems with Dr. Fauci’s AIDS clinical research program at the N.I.H., biting the hand that had just fed us. Our meetings were upgraded to long dinners at the home of Jim Hill, the deputy director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (Mr. Hill, who was not openly gay, later tested positive for H.I.V.) Over multiple bottles of wine, Dr. Fauci tried to placate us with what I called “the full Fauch,” an optimistic friendliness with a Brooklyn-smarts spin and a love of lively debates. Two opposing truths confronted us: We couldn’t help but love the guy, but his research program sucked. “Tony,” I said, “you’re a great scientist but a lousy administrator.”

Within months, hundreds of ACT UPers were surrounding his building at the N.I.H., and I was the first one arrested, after climbing onto its portico. Cops wrestled me down, bound my hands behind me with a zip tie, then hauled me through the building to a police van. The burly cop pulling my shoulder was dumbfounded when a familiar short man in a white lab coat walking toward us down the hallway yelled, “Peter, are you all right?” Laughing, I replied, “I’m fine. Just doing my job. How about you, Tony?”

Dr. Fauci soon caved on one of our primary demands: adding people with H.I.V. to all the committees overseeing his AIDS research programs. Those patient advocates slowly but surely got results, vastly improving a research network that was more recently used to enroll thousands of people in the initial Covid-19 vaccine trials. It was the birth of a patient advocacy model that all disease groups use today, fully embraced by the research establishment. And it’s a tradition that I hope will continue after Dr. Fauci’s retirement on Dec. 31.

Over the years, the dinners to hash out unfinished AIDS work continued. After Mr. Hill tragically died in 1997, Dr. Fauci and his wife, Christine, started hosting the activist dinners at their house. Dr. Fauci shocked all of us, quietly working with President George W. Bush to start the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, the most effective international public health program in our nation’s history, saving the lives of 20 million people thus far.

Dr. Fauci walked through the fire with us, and his friendships with AIDS activists deepened with time, bound by a shared trauma. In those early years, while some in our community were accusing him of not caring enough about AIDS, he didn’t tell us about the hundreds of gay men he had tried to save under his care at the N.I.H. hospital. Until this month, he still did rounds there, a clinician above all else.

When Covid hit and the rest of the world got to know Dr. Fauci, he leaned on us for guidance. David Barr, another ACT UP veteran, set up and hosted weekly calls with him and health officials from various frontline cities, allowing Dr. Fauci to counter the rosy spin from other members of the White House task force with a well-informed “That’s not what I’m hearing.” I’ve always been a politician among the activists, and it’s been the honor of my life that he leaned on me hard during his tumultuous year navigating “team normal” and “team crazy” in President Donald Trump’s orbit.

Like all of us, Dr. Fauci has his flaws, but I’ve never met a man more willing to let a friend rip into him. Our conversations are filled with F-bombs. His willingness to give absolutely everyone the benefit of some shared humanity — “I just met Jared, and he seems like a good guy” — is almost freakish but has come in handy over his stretch of working for seven presidents.

Because he crossed Mr. Trump, Dr. Fauci was turned into a villain for the MAGA crowd, providing fodder for those who thrive on conspiracies and hate. There has rarely been a larger gap between a mob’s viciousness and its target’s decency.

Beyond today’s frightening anti-science minority, there’s a majority that spans the world. Among them are H.I.V.-positive gay men like me who survived the earliest plague years — now, amazingly, aging into our 60s and 70s. We belong to a much wider community of people living with H.I.V. in America today, most of whom are people of color. And beyond our borders, we are bound to millions of men, women and children in sub-Saharan Africa whose lives have been saved by science and advocates for public health.

Our majority includes millions of Americans who listened to Dr. Fauci’s advice during that first scary year of Covid and kept listening as we got ourselves vaccinated and boosted, and we survived this plague. We draw hope from the progress of science. We are blessed with heroes willing to stand up for truth, unbowed by withering assaults.

On behalf of all of us, thank you, Tony Fauci.

I guess he’s used to being called every name in the book. But as this tribute makes clear, he always listened to his critics and did what he could to accommodate their demands. I don’t think he’d ever be able to do that with the right wing that’s now calling for him to be locked up. And that’s because they have no idea why they are saying it except to blame him for the virus which is simply a lie. Unlike the AIDS activists who squared off with Fauci in the 1980s, they have no interest in actually saving lives. In fact, they are eager members of a cult that welcomes the deaths of their own families in great numbers if it means they can own the libs. So it won’t work out the same way, unfortunately.

He’s a tough old bird so I don’t think any of this particularly throws him. (Well, except for the death threats against his family which has to be disconcerting.) But it’s a crying shame that he has to end his long career on this ugly note. The House Clowns will be calling him up to the hill to be abused in ridiculous hearings designed to do nothing but preen and pose for the QANON crowd. He’ll handle it. But he should have to.

A true pioneer

Baba Wawa passed away yesterday at the age of 93. When I was young I thought of her as one of the hosts of the Today Show and one of the only female broadcast journalists in the early days. It was only later that I came to realize that she was a particularly talented interviewer who took no prisoners.

One example:

Barbara Walters spoke the truth to The Donald back in 1990https://t.co/vPsbGxJMMT

— TrivWorks (@TrivWorks) December 31, 2022

She ended her inspiring career by inventing a new daytime TV genre of women talking about politics and current events in a freewheeling round table format at The View. It makes me happy that she lived such a long and accomplished life. RIP Baba.

Update: I had never seen this until today. What a send-off.

Simplest and best tribute to exemplify the Barbara Walters legacy :

On her final show on The View, they just brought one female journalist after another to honour her. All ages, races, from NBC to FOX, to say thank you. She’s completely overwhelmed and touched. pic.twitter.com/923BqlU7CG

— Lucas Meyer (@meyer_lucas) December 31, 2022

I just wanted to check in and thank you once again for your kind support this year. It is greatly appreciated. There’s a lot of competition out there so it really means the world to me that you value what we do here enough to help keep it going.

I’m going to leave this up until the end of the year in case any of you just stopped by and want to throw a little something our way.

I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday week (and that none of you are flying on Southwest!)

Cheers — digby

The circus is in town

Politico reports that Hunter’s laptop is only the beginning. The wingnuts holding the Speakership hostage want to establish a “Church Committee” to examine the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the federal government. I kid you not:

While the Republican leader and soon-to-be committee chairs have already lined up a laundry list of investigations that will largely command the House GOP’s agenda next year, it’s not enough for some McCarthy critics. Some of those opposing and on the fence about the Californian’s speakership bid want him to start a new panel, one that could direct probes against the entities they’ve castigated for years, including the FBI, theJustice Department, theIRS and Anthony Fauci.

Further complicating McCarthy’s position is that other Republicans aren’t on board. Some of his allies are skeptical that such a select committee wouldn’t severely overlap with the investigative plans that incoming chairs such as Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and James Comer (R-Ky.) have already worked on for months.

But after largely percolating on the edges of the conference and conservative media, the calls are getting harder for the speaker hopeful to ignore. Several members who McCarthy needs to win over if he’s going to secure the gavel are openly using the creation of such a panel — to investigate what they call a “weaponized government” — as a bargaining chip as the California Republican tries to lock down their votes.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said thatthe group has had “good conversations” with incoming chairs but thathe and other conservatives are pitching the select committee as a way to coordinate the conference’s investigative plans under one roof. They aren’t naming names on who they believe should lead the panel, though at least one skeptical McCarthy ally has argued that, if it has to happen, it should be Jordan.

“It needs to be targeted the right way,” Roy said about the party’s investigations. “You don’t get many bites at the apple. You’ve got to get it done right.”

Conservatives say they want to model the panel off the 1970s Church Committee, which conducted a landmark investigation that uncovered significant surveillance abuses among the intelligence community and the IRS, leading to the formation of the Senate Intelligence Committee. But it’s a high bar that’s almost certain to fall short. While the Church Committee was a bipartisan operation, Democrats have frequently criticized the GOP’s targeting of the FBI, and their party is highly unlikely to help fuel probes they’ve already derided as political sideshows.

And Democrats are already gearing up to rebut GOP investigations next year. Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, who will be on the frontlines as the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, summed up how he views his party’s responsibilities as it deals with Republican probes: “a truth squad in the sense that we will have to debunk conspiracy theories.”

And a former senior aide to the Democratic senator who chaired the Church Committee has also criticized Republicans for trying to make the Church comparison specifically, accusing them of wanting to invoke “Church’s legacy not to push for real solutions … but to obtain impunity for themselves and punish their enemies.”

But underscoring how much the “Church” rhetoric has injected itself into the party’s thinking, McCarthy, during a recent Fox Business appearance, tipped his hand toward the idea, saying that “you’re almost going to have to have a Church-style investigation to reform the FBI.”

McCarthy, notably, didn’t specifically mention setting up a new committee, and those comments would also align with previously planned investigations. The ambiguous comments come as the Californian tries to lock down the votes to claim the speaker’s gavel in a thin majority and wants to avoid alienating any more members. A spokesperson for the GOP leader didn’t respond to multiple questions about whether McCarthy was endorsing starting a new panel, or just an investigation into the Justice Department and FBI, which is already in the works.

It’s hardly the first time he’s faced pressure from his right flank to acquiesce to going further on investigations.

House Republicans say they now expect to probe the treatment of individuals who were jailed for participating in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, where a mob of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters breached the building as Congress was certifying Joe Biden’s win. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) previously pressed McCarthy on an investigation last month during a closed-door conference meeting.

Comer noted that there was an ongoing discussion about which panel “needs to take the lead on that,” adding that the Oversight Committee will have “a lot on the platter but we’ll do whatever we’re asked to do from leadership.”

McCarthy has also threatened to subpoena intelligence officials who signed a letter in 2020 warning that a New York Post story about Biden’s son Hunter might have its origins in a Russian disinformation operation. And conservatives also think they’ve moved McCarthy on impeaching Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. He hasn’t officially backed the step, but opened the door initially in April and then signaled an impeachment could be on the table, depending on the results of investigations, during a trip to the southern border in November.

Asked about the California Republican’s remarks, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) — whom McCarthy opponents have used as a figurehead for the opposition — noted that McCarthy’s latest border remarks came “after he knew that he was facing somebody who was going to possibly deny him being speaker.”

But conservatives’ vision for the new select committee could stretch far beyond just the FBI and Justice Department — two long-running targets of the party’s ire — by stepping into other jurisdictional lanes.

Roy pointed to three other entities that could fall under its purview, in addition to the FBI and Justice Department: Fauci and the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, the Department of Education and the IRS and money that will let the agency hire new staff. Those are all areas that other committees have indicated they plan to investigate. And while Roy acknowledged that potential overlap, he added, “You still want your best prosecutors prosecuting the case.”

Conservative insist they don’t want to step on the toes of Comer and Jordan — they just want a central, coordinated hub for investigations next year. McCarthy has been meeting with incoming chairs, including Jordan and Comer, as they plan out their series of probes next year. But supporters of creating a new panel argue that it could help free up Oversight and Judiciary Committee members, in particular, who are going to be busy juggling multiple investigations.

But Comer himself, and others in the conference, aren’t fans of the attempt to wade into the committees’ turf.

“I feel like we’ve got enough committees already to do all of that. I’m pretty passionate about that. I feel like you’ve got a Judiciary and Intelligence Committee that are very capable of doing that,” Comer said. “I’m not a big select committee or special counsel kind of guy.”

Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.), who is close to both Jordan and Comer, said he believes the two GOP chairs “have the bandwidth” already to run the investigations. And if there’s going to be a select committee, he said, they should both sign off.

“If you’re going to form that kind of committee, I want Jim Jordan to be the chair. Turns out, he’s already the chair of the committee who can go after the weaponization of government,” Armstrong said.

Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), a Freedom Caucus member who is backing the push for a new panel and hasn’t yet signaled whether he’ll vote for McCarthy, said thatthe committee would “definitely have to be in coordination with Judiciary and Oversight” but that it would send a “strong signal” about GOP priorities.

“We only have so much time,” Clyde said. “It’s the one thing we can’t make more of.”

Yes, it would send a strong signal about the GOP’s priorities. They seem to think that’s going to be good for them. They aren’t very smart, are they?

If you can find a reflection

The U.S. Department of Justice and Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis may ultimately judge Donald Trump by the content of his character as expressed in federal and state crimes. Failing at that, perhaps history will judge him by the company he keeps.

Trump simply applied gold leaf to his tinpot.

3:00 AM pic.twitter.com/CFLXZE95Ug

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 31, 2022

Business Insider: Ennemi du peuple was used to refer to those who disagreed with the new French government during the “Reign of Terror,” a period during which thousands of revolutionairies were executed by guillotine.

Jose Diaz, Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party (Report to Central Committee, 1937): “The main enemy of the people in the rearguard are the Trotskyists: they are the bitterest enemies of our cause, the direct agents of Franco in our ranks.”

Joseph Goebbels (1941): If someone wears the Jewish star, he is an enemy of the people. Anyone who deals with him is the same as a Jew and must be treated accordingly. 

The Guardian: “This term automatically made it unnecessary that the ideological errors of a man be proven,” Khrushchev [1956] said in his secret address to the Communist party’s inner circle.

BBC: And Chairman Mao, the leader of China who presided over the deaths of millions of people in a famine brought about by his Great Leap Forward, was also known to use the phrase against anyone who opposed him, with terrible consequences.

You made it through another year

If you have gone from cheering the arrival of the New Year to being thankful you survived the last, join the club.

Yet many, including the proprietress here, have considered the unexpected accomplishments of the Biden administration this last year. Digby wrote on Friday that she did not see Dark Brandon coming:

I think some of this success, paradoxically, is because Joe Biden is our oldest president, not in spite of that fact. There’s a certain YOLO quality to many people his age which he seems to have channeled into a willingness to take calculated risks that have largely paid off. Dark Brandon’s seen it all — he doesn’t scare easily.

Biden reminds audiences, repeatedly and forcefully, “It’s never been a good bet to bet against America!” Even among progressive activists (including this one), Biden’s unabashed America boosterism is sometimes cringe-inducing. While glass-half-empty cynics, the nihilists, the MAGAs, the QAnon cultists, and the fascism-curious gnaw like Teredo worms at the nation’s pilings, Biden is still betting on America. Unashamedly fighting the shameless.

As is often the case after Republican administrations in my lifetime, the incoming Democrat is charged with pulling the car out of the ditch. Biden has not just risen to the moment, he has embraced it, especially the foreign policy wreck left behind by Donald Trump. As Heather Cox Richardson observes, the world looked very different one year ago:

It appeared that a global authoritarian movement was coalescing for an attack on liberal democracy and that the leaders of the Republican Party were on the side of the authoritarians. The United Nations was formed after World War II to protect the idea of a rules-based international order so that countries would not unilaterally attack each other for their own advantage and start wars. If Russia, a member of the U.N. were allowed to violate the fundamental principle that had preserved relative peace in Europe since World War II, there was no telling what might come next.  

When Russia rolled tanks and troops into Ukraine it appeared the authoritarians might quickly prevail. Surprise.

When the U.S. offered to evacuate Zelensky, he said: “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.” Within days, he and his cabinet had recorded a video from Kyiv, demonstrating that the Ukrainian government was still in Kyiv and would fight to protect their country. Ukrainians defied the invaders as the U.S., NATO, the European Union, and allies around the globe rushed in money, armaments, and humanitarian aid. In Brussels, London, Paris, Munich, Dublin, and Geneva, and across the globe, people took to the streets to protest the invasion and show their support for the resisters. 

In their fight for their right to self-determination, the Ukrainians and their defenders reminded the United States what cherishing democracy actually looks like.

What the Viktor Orban-loving, extremist right’s response to the invasion and the January 6th Committee’s investigation exposed is how many among us are more Russian than American. The only thing American about them is their birth certificates. But what the November elections revealed is, for all their bilious hatred, domestic authoritarians remain a paranoid, delusional minority. A dangerous one still, a but a minority. Like Ukrainians, so long as the majority retains a will to fight, the authoritarians will not win the fight for the future.

Ukraine reminded us of that. Biden proved it was possible to launch an effective legislative counteroffensive against enemies of democracy even with the narrowest of congressional majorities. Don’t count America out. It’s not a good bet.

Happy New Year Hippos!

Fritz and Fiona ❤ pic.twitter.com/2Hw33T8oYP

— Cincinnati Zoo (@CincinnatiZoo) December 25, 2022

Dispatch from Cincinnati:

Stop what you’re doing right now and look at these stinking cute pictures of Fritz, the baby brother of the celebrated Cincinnati Zoo hippopotamus Fiona, stealing the show with his toothy grin.

“Fritz showing us his smile… and new teeth coming in!” the zoo tweeted this week.

Fritz, who was born Aug. 3, did appear to be smiling as he propelled himself around the 70,000-gallon pool at Hippo Cove. Twitter users couldn’t get enough of Fritz’s broad smile.

“I’d lay my life on the line for Fritz,” one user tweeted.

“Not to be dramatic,” another user said, “but I would die for Fritz,”

Fritz, who weighed 330 pounds at a recent weigh-in, is a bouncing baby boy in the most literal sense. Hippos don’t swim, exactly, but use their powerful legs to propel themselves through water. They spend a lot of time bouncing off the walls and bottoms of pools, according to a piece in The Atlantic written when Fiona was just a wee thing.

And tiny she was at birth.

Born six weeks prematurely on Jan. 24, 2017, Fiona was a puny 29 pounds, about half the previous record for the lowest birth weight for a member of her species. She almost didn’t make it and received life-saving care at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital’s nationally renowned Vascular Access Team.

Related: Fiona, The Most Beloved Hippo In The World, Has A Beau: Video

Fritz weighed about twice as much as his big sister when he made his arrival last August and, at the rate he’s growing, it won’t take long for him to grow to be the largest of the siblings.Hippos are among the largest mammals on Earth, with males weighing from 3,500 to 9,920 pounds at maturity and females topping out at around 3,000 pounds.

And though Fritz is gaining celebrity on social media, don’t expect Fiona, who will turn 6 early next year, to go all shrinking violet and hide in the corner of the pool. Fiona has a beau (click for the video) and her legions of fans are taking in every minute of the “courtship.”

Fritz biting off more than he can chew! pic.twitter.com/ld0AEb4Ykp

— Cincinnati Zoo (@CincinnatiZoo) December 28, 2022

Baby hippos are cute!

Dave Weigel’s take on the best achievements in campaigning is one of the more interesting year-end pieces I’ve read. He spends all his time on the trail and I suspect he knows what he’s talking about:

Best U.S. Senate campaign: John Fetterman in Pennsylvania. Did he get an assist when Donald Trump lifted Mehmet Oz to win the GOP primary? Obviously. Did a decade-plus of ad campaigns, TED Talks, and media profiles of the 6’8’’ mayor of a left-for-dead town help him? Yes, but that wasn’t luck, and he’d already run for Senate and lost before, in 2016.

This year’s Fetterman campaign excelled at everything, convincing Democratic primary voters that a candidate Republicans would call “socialist” was electable, then pummeling Oz while its own candidate recovered from a stroke. The best Fetterman gimmicks — like his constant Twitter trolling of Oz, largely for his living until recently in New Jersey — probably wouldn’t work for other candidates, which was the point. He spent years developing a style and record that could appeal to non-Democrats, which the campaign boiled into “no county left behind,” sending the candidate to places where his party was toxically unpopular and spending in underserved markets like Erie.

Best gubernatorial campaign: Joe Lombardo in Nevada. He did what no other Republican could pull off this year, unseating a Democratic governor by indicting his record during the pandemic and the 2021 crime spike. Lombardo pocketed an endorsement from Donald Trump, then never talked about the ex-president, separating himself from a statewide ticket obsessed with re-fighting 2020.

Best congressional campaign: George Santos in New York. If his luck is running out now, and bizarre inconsistencies and lies about his background end his career in the House, it can’t erase what he pulled off. He ran as a sacrificial lamb in 2020, lost by 12.5 points, fashionably suggested that the election was stolen, and immediately started running again. He stayed under the radar, filed his financial disclosure 20 months after the deadline, and wasted tens-of-thousands of dollars on baffling expenses. Then he won by 8.2 points, zooming along with the Long Island GOP wave. Other candidates ran more, let’s say, sustainable campaigns, but nobody beat the system like Santos, a.k.a. Zabrovsky.

Best state party: The Republican Party of Florida. It set the standard for raising money, finding new voters, and building a flywheel for its statewide dominance. This was less of a breakthrough year than a culmination, with three long-term decisions paying off for Gov. Ron DeSantis and the RPOF.

First: DeSantis appointed conservative judges to state courts, which dramatically reduced the risk of Republican-drafted maps or voting laws being struck down. Second: DeSantis raised more money than any candidate for governor ever had, in a state where there are no limits on donations to political committees, which helped Republicans take their first-ever lead over Democrats in voter registration. Third: DeSantis took control of the redistricting process and substituted a map that had included several opportunities for Democrats with one that would give them just eight of 28 House seats.

Best return on investment: The $60 million spread across the country by the States Project, a progressive effort to flip state legislatures and deny Republicans the power to shape key election rules going forward. Progressive donors had tried that and failed in 2020, casting a pall over the whole idea. But in 2022 the strategy paid off.

Even in Arizona, where the extra money didn’t switch control of the state Senate, it helped the party win down-ballot races after the GOP picked weak MAGA candidates (a bit like what happened in the state’s contest for governor). The coalition of “America First Secretary of State candidates” nearly got wiped out, reduced to one win in Indiana, thanks in part to all the new progressive money highlighting races that voters usually pay less attention to.

Best luck: Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat whom Republicans drew into a seat designed to elect whoever got out of their primary. Two GOP state legislators battled it out for the right to face her; both lost to J.R. Majewski, described by one publication as a “novelty-rapping, QAnon-curious Air Force veteran,” who’d traveled to D.C. for the Jan. 6 insurrection and gotten some local attention for painting a 19,000 square foot Trump banner on his lawn.

Best Ad (Primary): J.D. Vance for Senate, “Are You a Racist?” They knew who’d make fun of it, and that was why it would work. Vance, who spent a whole campaign breaking the hearts of liberals who’d bought “Hillbilly Elegy,” was losing the Ohio U.S. Senate primary when he put this out. “Do you hate Mexicans?” Vance asked sarcastically, telling primary voters that they should be able to talk about drug trafficking without being canceled.

Best Ad (General): Mary Peltola, “Don Young’s Legacy.” Helped by Alaska’s new top-four runoff system, Peltola ran further ahead of Joe Biden’s 2020 numbers than any other Democrat in the country. Her memorable ads talked about her support for the fishing industry, her support for abortion rights, and her political independence, positioning her as the heir to 49-year GOP incumbent Don Young after his death.

Best pollster: We’ve got a dramatic, academic tie here: New York’s Siena College and Boston’s Suffolk University, both of which accurately snapshotted the electorate even as pundits and bad polling foresaw a GOP wave. In Arizona and Pennsylvania, for instance, Siena put Mark Kelly up by 6 points and John Fetterman up by 5 points; both won by 4.9 points. A Suffolk poll conducted for USA Today gave Catherine Cortez Masto a 1-point lead, and she won by 0.9 points.

The 2020 election was rough for traditional pollsters, constantly adjusting to lower and lower response rates. But they nailed 2022, and walked away with more credibility than partisan outfits who predicted everything breaking towards Republicans. Some pollsters saw exactly what was happening; some saw a single-digit race for U.S. Senate in Vermont, where Democrat Peter Welch ended up winning by 39.5 points.

Best campaign podcast: Steve Bannon’s War Room Radio, whose influence grew even as its most frequent guests got turfed by voters. No subpoena or criminal conviction could stop Bannon from turning his show into Radio Londres for the MAGA movement, a waiting room for the next Republican majority, embodied by characters like Blake Masters, Joe Kent, and Kari Lake. Candidates who don’t talk to legacy media, as a rule, shared their strategies and agendas (including the revenge they’d seek over the 2020 election) with Bannon. In the words of Sun Tzu, one may know how to conquer without being able to do it.

The Houdini prize for escaping potential disaster: Oregon Democrats, who did not nominate Carrick Flynn for Congress. Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced cryptocurrency exchange founder and an investor in Semafor, put $27 million into the Protect Our Future PAC, which spread it to 19 Democratic candidates. Flynn, a pandemic researcher with ties to Bankman-Fried, got nearly $10.5 million worth of help from the PAC. The House Democrats’ super PAC flew in to help, signaling that the party wanted to stay on Bankman-Fried’s good side. All of that backfired, with Flynn’s rivals uniting to criticize the outside money, and Rep.-elect Andrea Salinas winning the primary by 18 points — thus sparing her party the potential headache of having to welcome SBF’s handpicked congressman into their caucus.

The Cassandra prize for best unheeded warning: The North Shore Leader, a Long Island newspaper that published numerous stories questioning the resume that George Santos was offering voters in New York’s 3rd congressional district. Its reporting on the candidate’s (very late) personal campaign finance statement asked why “a man of such alleged wealth” lived in a rented apartment and took out a five-figure car loan to drive a Nissan. Good question!

I don’t like hearing about the successful GOP campaigning but it’s very useful to know about it. Maybe the Democrats will make note of it as well. That ad by J.D. Vance is important to study. If it worked as Weigel says it did they need to figure out how to deal with it because it speaks to a reflexive defensiveness by Republicans and some Independents.

But I couldn’t be more thrilled than to see the States Project deliver results. It was long overdue and the Party should have been behind this years ago.

All in all, an interesting take. Lots to think about.